Saturday 30 June 2012 19.03 EDT
First published on Saturday 30 June 2012 19.03 EDT

Passion Pit make the kind of relentlessly effervescent, maximalist electro-pop that conjures images of over-excited toddlers let loose in ball pits. Until, that is, you realise all that giddy mania is the vehicle for some of the most despondent lyrics around. Twenty-five-year-old Michael Angelakos, frontman and founder, is responsible for both extremes but in person – a tired, anxious, thoughtful young man – it's far easier to square him with the latter. When Passion Pit released their first album, Manners, in 2009, it arrived on a tide of buzz. Three years on, they're about to release their second, Gossamer, and the pressure seems to be getting to Angelakos's vocal chords. Though they're a five-piece, it's very much Angelakos's project.

"I'm under so much stress," he says, making tea in the kitchen of his very grown-up, very stylish Brooklyn apartment. "I went to a vocal research centre, which is where Adele, everyone, goes, and they said you've got to chill out. I mean the amount of pressure I'm under right now is just immense…"

Really, though, he should just feel relief: this album was a long time coming due to long months of writer's block.

"I think that the greatest thing I did was to eventually say, 'OK, this is what Passion Pit is, just do it, just write the goddamn record.' I was suffering chronic fatigue due to … just … a lot of alcohol … it just was a really bad time. At that point Chris [Zane, their producer] said to me: 'I don't know if I can do this record any more.' And finally I said, 'Get out of the studio' and sat down at my computer for eight hours and made I'll Be Alright."

That song includes the line: "I'm so self-loathing that it's time for me to see/Reality from what I dream and no one believes me."

"I've been suffering from... you know, bipolar since I was 17," he says. "But I don't think that has anything to do with the music. Lots of people try to over-glorify it, like this thing that's really interesting, and actually it's the most painful thing in the world so I'd rather not talk about it."

"You get in the crowd," he says, "and see the way they're dancing and smiling and jumping up and down and singing these songs and you're like, 'You have no idea what's going on!' Manners, especially, is sooo bleak. That's a very introverted record. I really did not like myself. But I've always been able to write happy music very easily and I don't know why."

Passion Pit began, almost accidentally, when Angelakos recorded songs as a tardy Valentine's Day offering for his girlfriend in 2008.

The tracks were circulated around Emerson College, Massachusetts, where he was taking a media studies course, and eventually he was persuaded to put them online, as an EP called Chunk of Change.

"I just thought MySpace was for people who wanted to get famous," he says, "and I really didn't care about that – I thought I was going to go into film scoring."

Nonetheless: "I did it and it fucking blew up. And I was like…" he performs an exaggerated eye-roll, "… goddammit."

He adds: "This sounds so ungrateful, and I'm incredibly grateful, but I wish the way people found out about us wasn't because of the internet. My least favourite part of being a musician is the internet."

The site that made them is now, in his words, "a ghost town full of paedophiles and emo bands" but Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the rest all make their demands. He mostly leaves that, he says, to the rest of the band. When it comes to the music, though, he confirms he is a supreme control freak.

"We now know, I do the records, I write the songs, I bring the songs to the band, the band learns them, I come back in, I tweak everything, we make sure everything works perfectly, and then we go onstage. The process of creating a Passion Pit song is so laborious that if I had one more person than the two people that were in [the studio] already, I think I would lose my mind."

When he mentions turning 25 recently I ask if that birthday prompted anything of a quarter-life crisis. He settles back on the sofa and smiles. "I'm always in crisis. Always. Yeah that's the problem."

But, for their fans, it's a welcome problem: without the constant crisis, Angelakos probably wouldn't be writing songs at all.